I.

A spider strutted across my forearm, pausing before sinking its fangs into my skin. The pain was bliss. The first thing I’d felt since the feeling stopped. I nearly enjoyed it enough to work up a moan. But believing I had enough life to even accomplish that that would be horribly absurd.

II.

They left me there. The aficionados of violence left me there immobile in the grasp of the rusty blade that rested in a fourth of my neck, not having fully cut through due to lack of momentum. Attempted decapitation. The days were long. I hadn’t been alone a day in my life, and now everything seemed to be centrifugal to my presence. Even the animals resented my body. I wasn’t breathing. I wasn’t moving. I wasn’t feeling. I was observing. Studying the convoluted tall grass and bark of the trees, the wrinkles and pores of my sickly skin that would eventually collapse in on my viscera.

Is this the death God had chosen for me?

III.


The antecedent of my death was marvelous. It wasn’t a scientific remedy, what the man used. No man or earth made chemical could have the potential to give life to a woman with a month old gash in the side of her neck. He nurtured me, stripping my limp body and bathing it in a thick cold solution. After days of repetitively taking the subzero water, I shivered. And that horrid shiver must have been the greatest thing in the world. Greater than sweets. Greater than hugs. Greater than life. This man’s volition to recreate my fifth sense, despite his disingenuous attitude, benevolent